Not Fair
by Fish and Bird
Summary: As the Final Battle begins, Argus Filch must make a decision after having reexamined his life.


**Not Fair  
**

**By Fish and Bird**

_"Noble hearts are neither jealous nor afraid because jealousy spells doubt and fear spells pettiness."_

_Honore de Balzac_

_**Duuummm**_

Fine dust fell in graceful whorls from the ceiling and rafters as the castle reverberated to its very roots under the latest of a long series of powerful blows against its magical wards. There was something strangely comforting about the regularity with which these attacks fell, as if they emulated the striking of an old and familiar bell which called one to a much welcome midday meal. By the time the next meal was served at Hogwarts, however, the glowing embers of the Second War would long ago have cooled, and its victor proclaimed triumphant.

For He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named was here, and today would see the end of things.

Filch cut his usual ragged figure but presented an even more bizarre image than was usually the case. He was on his knees with his head bowed and his arms spread wide, as if he were a humble supplicant before a powerful authority. Leaning slightly to his right, as if incapable of maintaining himself in a straight line, he remained so still as to look nothing more than a poorly constructed scarecrow whose owner had neglected to collect it from the field.

A low, grizzle seemed to be emanating from the direction of the man, but even in the profound silences between the assaults upon the castle, it was nigh on impossible to make out what he was saying. Had anyone been present to bear witness to the spectacle, however, especially a person endowed with acute hearing, they might have imagined they could hear two words being bitterly repeated over and over again.

_"Not fair! Not fair!"_

_**Duuummm**_

_"Not fair! Not fair!"_ cried the young boy.

Even at such a young age when many boys are skinny and sport ears to rival the handles on a jug, it was obvious that this particular specimen would never win any beauty contests. It was not the fact that his pinched face had absolutely no traces of pleasing features whatsoever and that even his mother couldn't find it in her to talk about how handsome he was going to be. Nor was it the fact that he was significantly shorter than his peers, a fact which the typical cruelty of children would not allow to pass uncommented upon. Rather, it was the fact that the age of ten the boy had yet to manifest the merest suggestion of his supposed magical powers.

To be sure, none of the larger boys who were now taunting him could exercise any measure of control over their burgeoning powers, but the very fact of their existence assured them of their place in the only world they knew. For those rare few children who did not show any spark of a magical core, however, life was difficult as was evidenced by the fact that the small boy was standing in his overlarge clothes, looking particularly pathetic as he looked up at the tiny paper bird which the children were trying to keep aloft with whatever puffs of magic they could muster.

They always did this! They always played magic games the moment he showed up, even if they didn't want to.

_**Duuummm**_

He told his mother what the children did, of course, but she looked uncomfortable and would quickly close the window, telling him it wasn't important and not to make a fuss. It was much later that he realised she was embarrassed of him and his weakness; of the shame his being a Squib brought to his family. These small examples of adult cruelty, though mild in comparison to those of children, would cause him much greater damage in the long run.

To put it quite simply, adults were uncomfortable in his presence, as if he were contagious and capable of stealing their ability to manipulate magic. This was an intolerable concept for any magic user from the highest of Purebloods to the newly-arrived Muggle-born. The former was an elitist who had but a hazy and ill-informed concept of life without magic whilst the latter was all too familiar with such an existence, but they were united by the indescribable fear of these unwholesome examples of the failure of wizardkind to propagate itself correctly.

The small boy thought it normal to only rarely hear his father's voice at night and to see him even less. After all, did his mother not keep telling him that he had an important job at the Ministry of Magic which meant he had to work long hours there? He clung to this fact as a drowning sailor would cling to whatever flotsam and jetsam he could find, an act which only ended up wounding him even more deeply. For when he finally lost his temper with the increasingly indifferent and hostile treatment meted out to him at the hands of the world, he began to promise dire retribution at the hands of his father.

The stinging humiliation of learning the truth when those horrible children had led him, guffawing as they did so, to a cheap and seedy restaurant where his father cleaned all day was almost too much for him to bear. The look of defeat on his face had quietened and shamed even the least sensitive of those who taunted him, and after that he was generally left to his own devices. This was cold comfort to the small boy, however.

_"Not fair! Not fair!"_ he had wailed as he sobbed bitterly into his pillow every night, longing for the comforting touch of his mother's hand which never came.

_**Duuummm**_

And so it continued throughout the bitter unfolding of his life.

The harsh treatment he suffered at the hands of the witches and wizards surrounding him was echoed by the institutions of wizardkind. They were not set up to cater to the almost unheard of phenomenon of Squibs and, truth be told, nor did they want to. If adults were uncomfortable with the prospect of being infected with whatever…malady…caused such an offence against nature, how could they be expected to react when faced with the same threat to their children?

Needless to say that there was no place for the boy at Hogwarts, or indeed at any other seat of learning. Instead, he was left to be educated by his parents; by a father who no longer even pretended to care for him and in turn to whom the boy no longer spoke, and a mother who was growing increasingly remote as he grew older and her maternal instinct, already stretched way beyond that of any reasonable woman according to her neighbours, waned with the passing of each year.

So the boy aged and grew taller, if not broader, and his soul twisted under his burdens. Eventually, he took to sharing what meagre fare he had with small animals in an attempt to gain some small measure of affection. It worked, after a fashion, and henceforth he was always to be seen in the company of whatever animal he managed to attract: animals which neither cared for his unpleasing demeanour or his unceasing litany of complaint.

_"Not fair! Not fair!"_

_**Duuummm**_

He still had some twisted sense of pride left to him as he grew into an even more rancorous and hard-hearted version of the skinny boy. He dressed as well as his threadbare existence would allow him and restlessly sought employment of any kind. Slowly, he came to view wizardkind with almost as much disdain as they regarded him, seeing them as decadent and arrogant. Each and every waking moment sought to remind him that he had been wronged. Every time he saw the most mundane of magical feats performed he tasted bile and felt the inextinguishable rage which had been kindled in his breast as a boy. His transformation was complete and he now faced the world as an utterly amoral and self-centred individual.

And that was how things would continue until the first of two life-altering events happened: he came to be employed as the Caretaker of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. He had been sitting in his freezing garret, the collar of his shabby old coat drawn up against the cold and Mr. Worthing nestling in his bony lap for whatever warmth might be there, when he had happened across an advert in a week-old copy of The Daily Prophet. It invited applications for the post of Caretaker, reporting directly to the Headmaster, one Albus Dumbledore.

The brew he was drinking was as tasteless as always, him already having used the teabag on at least three previous occasions, and he was not sorry to discover it had grown cold in his thin hands as he had sat in silent contemplation of the small column. The thought had blossomed in his mind that it would be fine thing to hold such a position of authority over the next generation of wizardkind; a position where he would be able to wield the whip for a change and where he would be shown proper deference.

Not trusting the job to his own cold-stiffened hands, he had immediately shuffled into the street and procured the services of a passing girl by waving one of his few remaining Sickles at her. As this curious couple had sat at the side of the street, the teenage witch had patiently written out his terse application in a reasonably fair hand and had escaped his unnerving presence just as soon as she was able, having tugged the silver coin from his hand.

He would be hard-pressed to provide a coherent account of the time between receiving the reply to his application and taking up the post. Never expecting anything to come of the letter, he had been genuinely shocked to receive a letter, written to him by the Headmaster himself, which invited him to attend an interview and enclosed a return train ticket. Desperately fighting against his unrealistic hopes and fantasies with every fibre of his being, he had presented himself on the appointed time and date, as well turned out as he had ever been.

He never used the return portion of the ticket, instead sending an owl requesting his landlady to burn the few meaningless possessions of his which remained in the pokey attic. His already narrow chest felt constricted as he looked out over his new demesne. This was his second chance, he told himself. He would now find the respect which he yearned for so desperately. He would now finally be accepted by the very society which had for so long shunned him.

Yet he did not find respect and nor was he accepted.

_"Not fair! Not fair!"_

_**Duuummm**_

Another rain of dust gently settled on his head, shoulders and outstretched arms. He opened his eyes this time, however, as the reverberations from the mighty blow against the castle's wards had taken on a deeper and more disturbing timbre. Time was running out.

The boiling sense of shame which had been rising in his pigeon chest all night was now sending tendrils up into his mouth and the taste was altogether bitterer than anything he had previously tasted. For all that he was an uneducated man, Argus Filch was by no means an unintelligent one. To this day he remembered the way he had felt under the scrutiny of the piercing blue eyes of Albus Dumbledore. It was as if his soul had been laid bare and was being dissected, measured and weighed.

Whatever the Headmaster had been looking for, he had found it along with a well of untapped rage, jealousy and hatred towards any being which was perceived to have wronged that skinny boy. After a long moment of neutral appraisal, the old man had risen to his feet and offered his hand with what seemed like a genuine smile. Long had Filch pondered the unfathomable motives of the old man, but his efforts had been fruitless. Never had he been asked for nor forbidden anything and the respect which he so craved had seemed unsatisfying, coming as it did from so mild a man.

Time passed and although he was not particularly unhappy, the desire for acceptance had soon reasserted itself, never to be satisfied. With each passing year, he sought to stamp his authority all the harder on the students, but with no avail. His plans and hopes, as ever, amounted to nothing.

_"Not fair! Not fair!"_

_**Duuummm**_

Quite when the change had stolen upon him, he had no idea. The boy had been more troublesome than the average student, but by no means the worst in his time as Caretaker. He was short and skinny it was true, but then so were half of the boys his age and they engendered no particular feelings in the cold breast of the misanthropic caretaker. It was something else, something in his eyes.

Although he might have recognised a kindred spirit in the boy, that did not mean he would receive more leniency. Quite to the contrary, in order to repress the memories of his own terrible childhood, he was forced to stamp down on him all the harder just to prove that he was no longer affected by those dim, distant memories. Not that it did any good, of course. As time went by and he became more and more aware of the true nature of things by listening to the students gossiping in the corridors, and slowly came to the realisation that the Potter boy was very much like himself in that he was an outsider, and not by choice. Raised by Muggles, hated for being different in his own world, denied his rightful heritage and doomed from the first day – that sounded about right to him.

Despite this being the case, however, he could not reconcile the boy's actions with his past. No one seemed to like Potter or seek out his company save the other two freaks, and there could be little doubt of the boy's ultimate fate at the hands of…the other one. Yet the boy insisted on trying to help the others – those who had spurned him. Why? Was it for the respect such actions would garner him? Maybe he had a secret weapon and knew he would win? Perhaps he was mad and wanted to die? Or maybe, maybe he was none of these and simply wanted to…help? That was the most difficult concept of all.

But why would he care what happened to the likes of a Squib if and when the Death Eaters gained the upper hand? Why would he put himself in danger for the Muggle-born, the Half-Bloods and the Blood Traitors? Why was Potter fighting for Filch…for them… instead of running?

Why?

_"Not fair! Not fair!"_ he said, possibly for the last time in his life. _"Not fair on me and not fair on Potter!"_

_**Duuummm**_

Having garbed himself with a battered old breastplate, a rusty pike and an antique helmet, he moved reluctantly towards the heavy wooden door. The leather straps of the helm swayed in rapid rhythm to his shuffling steps and made his face seem even thinner than usual, if that was indeed possible.

He used the butt of the pike to keep Mrs. Norris inside the room as she tried to follow him, wheezing, _"Daddy'll back soon, precious. Daddy'll be back soon and if he isn't…well, somebody'll find you soon enough."_

The pathetic figure turned to shuffle out of the chamber.


End file.
